Tattle: New arrival to add clash to 'Downton'

January 31, 2012|By Howard Gensler
  • Shirley MacLaine will join the cast of "Downton Abbey" in its third season.

SHIRLEY MACLAINE is coming to "Downton Abbey."

The 77-year-old Oscar winner will play the mother of Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern), in the third season of the hit period drama.

Gareth Neame of Carnival Films, which produces the show, said MacLaine's character will be a "wonderful combatant" for Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess.

Ooh, catfight.

A gift for U's

A throwback to the days when magazines and movies both made money, Cosmopolitan founder Helen Gurley Brown is donating $30 million to Stanford and Columbia universities to create a bicoastal media "innovation laboratory."

The gift honors Brown's late husband, producer David Brown ("Jaws," "Driving Miss Daisy"). He graduated from Stanford and from Columbia's journalism school.

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The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation will be housed on both campuses.

Columbia Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann said the goal is to make technological advances that will have a lasting effect on journalism and other media.

If news organizations don't figure out a way to generate revenue for content Dean, there will be no journalism to advance.

Too much 'spice'?

ABC News reports that the seizures Demi Moore experienced before her friends called 9-1-1 may have been due to the side effect of smoking the synthetic drug "spice."

Moore's symptoms were all very common adverse reactions to "spice" (a/k/a "incense"), according to Louisiana's Poison Control Center director, Mark Ryan.

Ryan said that what makes the synthetic drugs particularly risky (other than the fact that they're unregulated synthetic drugs) is that there's "no quality control" in their production process.

"When someone buys these products, they don't know exactly what ingredient they may be getting and they don't know the amount of the substance that's in there," Ryan said. "So somebody may get one batch and get 5 mg; someone may buy the product around the corner and get 2,000 mg."

Know thy dealer, people. Know thy dealer.

Muppets fight Fox

In December, Fox Business Channel's "Follow the Money" host, Eric Bolling, accused "The Muppets" movie of being anti-corporate and indoctrinating children with Hollywood liberalism when it comes to Big Oil and Big Business.

Kermit the Frog struck back in England, while promoting the upcoming U.K. release of the movie, distributed by the itsy-bitsy, granola-chomping, anti-corporate, publicly traded Walt Disney Co.

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